When we were reading Lauren Castillo’s book The Troublemaker this week, we talked a lot about troublemakers and especially about people we knew who were troublemakers and whether we ourselves were. Siblings were often blamed, but most of the students admitted that sometimes they were indeed a troublemaker themselves.
Later, the students tweeted about who they thought were the biggest troublemakers so that other people could see the connections they made to the book. You can see each students’ tweet below.

On the last day of school, each student used a paper cup to make his or her own “car”.

The cars were of lots of different makes and models. Some even included windshields.

Then the real fun began! The students used our Sphero robot to power the cars and raced the cars down a track they had created. Some cars couldn’t quite keep up with the speedy Sphero, but no one cared. As you can hear below, it was a lot of FUN.

This past year, the students recorded their reading in November, February and June using an app called Book Creator. The results of this are on their blogs, showing their developing reading prowess through the school year. One example is below. Check the others out on the students’ blogs and leave them a comment to tell them how clever they are.

We have been working on procedural or “how to do something” writing. Each student chose to write how to do something that he or she knew how to do well. These ranged from how to make chocolate chip cookies to how to make a friend. Check out the students blogs to see their descriptions.